NEW: Bloomberg Saturday read
— Counter-terrorism police and the security services are confronting what they fear is an increased long-term terror threat in Britain inspired by the conflict in Gaza, as well as rising antisemitism and greater operational difficulties in stopping lone terrorists radicalised online.
— “We are powerfully alive to the risk that events in the Middle East directly trigger terrorist action in the UK,” MI5 chief Ken McCallum said last year. Britain has mercifully avoided major terror incidents in recent years. The security services had feared that might not last.
— Security officials are concerned by what they see as the unquantifiable potentially radicalising effect on thousands of people in Britain, especially young people, of watching high-resolution videos of people being killed in Gaza every day. That poses both an immediate threat and the danger of what McCallum has called “slower-burn radicalisation.”
— Anti-terror police have disrupted alleged plots targeting Jewish people since Oct 7. Two men are due to face trial later this month charged with allegedly planning a gun attack on Jews in north-west England. Police are still investigating an alleged plot against the Israeli embassy this year. Last year a Moroccan asylum seeker was jailed for killing a man in a Gaza-inspired terrorist attack.
— A shift in the nature of terrorism from organised cells and larger terror groups toward lone actors means new challenges for anti-terror police. Some successful recent terrorist incidents have been carried out by people who were not on the security services’ radar, acting alone, who often quite suddenly became radicalised to the point of violence by material they had found online.
— Investigators are dealing with a messier picture, finding terrorists with limited grasp of their stated cause, often with mental-health problems and personal issues as well as extremist ideological motivations.
— For all those complexities they see one certainty: that the online world is central to both the threat and countering it, hence the UK’s ongoing efforts to circumvent encryption for terror suspects, sparking a fight with Apple and the US.
— “Sadly, we’ve long known about, and struggled to combat, the power of what people see online in radicalising minds, especially young minds. We will probably be living with the online reverberations of Hamas’s attack and the Israeli response for many years to come,” former Cabinet Secretary Simon Case told Bloomberg.
— As well as lone attackers, officials are also concerned by efforts by Al-Qaeda and particularly Islamic State Khorasan Province to use the conflict in Gaza to export their ideologies to Britain once again.
— The UK might have expected to see more Gaza-related violence if it wasn’t for Al-Qaeda and Islamic State traditionally focusing their motivations on other conflicts, namely in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, one source said. Those groups are now trying to change that to use Gaza to encourage attacks in Britain.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…